Rise of Islam
The '''Rise of Islam' lasted from about 565 AD until 768 AD. It began with Rome and Persia rumbling towards a chronic and inevitable war, that left both empires exhausted and vulnerable to a new predatory rival; the armies of Islam. It then ended on the eve of the reign of the towering figure of early medieval Europe; the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne. In the early 7th-century, Arabia became the cradle of one of the great world religions. There are perhaps three startling things about Islam. The first thing is of course the spiritual genius of the Prophet Muhammad. It is said that while praying in a cave outside Mecca, he was visited for the first time by the voice of God, and for twenty-two years recited the truth revealed to him. The result was one of the great formative books of mankind, the Qur'an. As a spiritual leader Muhammad founded a faith that has shown greater expansive and adaptive power than any other religion except Christianity, appealing to peoples as different and as distant from one another as Nigerians and Indonesians. As a political leader he helped to unite all the disparate tribes of Arabia for the first time in its history. The second startling thing about Islam is the speed and extent of the Arab conquests. The Muslim tide seemed invincible, born as it was on the fire of religious zeal, destined to spread Islam by the sword throughout the world. Circumstances certainly favoured the Arabs; their first victims, the Byzantine and Persian empires, had been left exhausted and vulnerable by the devastating Roman-Persian War (602-628). By the mid-8th-century, just over a century after the Prophet's passing, the results were an empire stretching from the Iberian Peninsula in the west, to the Oxus River of Central Asia in the east. That tide did not flowed without interruption. There was a lull during bitter Muslim against Muslim fighting just before the establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate in 661; a civil war whose consequences are still with us in the schism between the Sunni and Shi'a branches of Islam. Only in one campaign can the Arab armies be said to have definitively failed; the conquest of Constantinople, unsuccessfully besieged in 674 and 717. Whatever brought the Islamic conquests to an end, and sometimes their defeats such as at Tours in 732 showed they had overextended themselves, they remain an extraordinary achievement, comparable in the Middle Ages only with the Mongol conquests of the 13th-century. The third startling thing about Islam is their ability to consolidate their conquests into a cultivated, wealthy, and highly civilised Muslim empire. While the Germanic peoples degraded the Roman civilisation they conquered and ruled, Muslims newly arrived in Byzantine or Persian lands openly embraced existing techniques of administration and the intellectual heritages. If the Byzantine Empire, the ''Barbarian Kingdoms'', and the Christian Church are three of the inheritors of the Roman Empire, then the Muslim world made a fourth. And for a long time it was the most magnificent of them all. Under the Abbasid Caliphate, it would enjoy an effervescence of culture and learning unlike anything that had been seen since Classic Greece. History Early Roman-Persian War (565-602 AD) By the end of the reign of Justinian the Great, the Byzantine Empire was enjoying an economic boom. An array of well-built stone churches were being built across the empire, irrigation was pushing agriculture out into the desert fringes, and a network of commercial routes criss-crossed the Mediterranean linking all the major trading centres. We labour under the handicap of knowing it did not last, for Justinian bequeathed to his successors many problems: an imperial treasury under severe strain; an army stretched thin in the wake of the most serious outbreak of plague to hit Europe before the Black Death; and a delicate diplomatic balancing-act required to maintain peace with the empire's various enemies. Justinian's policy had often been to buy peace, paying an annual tribute to both the Sassanid Persians and to two new barbarian groups on the northern banks of the Danube. The first was the Avar Khaganate (567-822), a confederacy of Turkic steppe nomads who now dominated the region as the successors of the Huns. The second was the Slavs, a forest people in the woods east of the original Germanic settlement areas; the Slavs are among the least documented of all the barbarian peoples, so there is no scholarly consensus regarding their origin. Justinian's successors proved neither as wise nor as forceful as he had been, adopting short-sighted policies that within a generation would bring the empire to the very edge of collapse. His nephew and immediate successor Justin II (565-574) opted to preserve the imperial treasury, immediately halting the tribute to the Avars. The Avars grew increasingly aggressive, and the Germanic Lombards under their great leader Alboin (d. 572) felt it more prudent to leave the region, moving south into Byzantine Italy in 568. The Lombards invaded an Italy still devastated and depopulated by the Gothic War (535–554). As his kingdom steadily grew in size until it encompassed virtually the whole peninsula, Alboin focused his energies on securing his borders and left governing each region to subordinates and members of his family. When the Byzantines assassination him in 572, the Lombard regional dukes fought each other over the succession, and the result was a high decentralised Lombard political structure, with some 36 autonomous duchies that could only be unified under a strong king. Meanwhile the Byzantines managed to retain the major cities of Ravenna, Rome and Naples, as well as much of the coastal south that could be supplied by the imperial fleet. Thus by the late 6th-century, the Italian peninsula was a patchwork of provincial states, a situation that was to last; Italy would not be united again until 1861. Although the peninsula was fragmented, these small-scale states were stable and well-governed, with each duke wanting the best for his particular region. City-life survived in Italy much better than anywhere else in Western Europe. Meanwhile in Constantinople, Emperor Justin II also refused to pay tribute to Sassanid Persia in 572. Again his intransigence only increased the menace to the empire, for in two disastrous campaigns the Persians ravaged Syria and captured the strategically important fortress of Dara on the upper Euphrates. This was the start of decades of near continuous hostilities between the two great empire of the east, that would turn into a much more wide-ranging and dramatic conflict from 602. Justinian's next successor, Tiberius II Constantine (574-582), opted for a different approach. He chose between his enemies, restoring the tribute to the Avars, while taking military action against the Persians. While his armies enjoyed stabilised the eastern frontier, the denuded Danube defences eventually proved too tempting for the Avars. In 582, they captured the key Byzantine fortress of Sirmium on the Danube, a perfect launching-pad for future raids on imperial territory. At the same time, the Slavs also began to make inroads across the Danube into the Balkans. The Byzantines were finally granted some respite during the reign of Maurice (582-602), when Sassanid Persia entered a period of civil war. In 590, prince Khosrow II (d. 628) fled to Byzantine territory after the murder of his father, and appealed to Constantinople for help against the usurpers. Against the advise of many, Maurice agreed, sending armies east that helped him claim his throne. The energetic emperor was rewarded with a new peace treaty in 591, that allowed him to concentrate on the Danube frontier, where he had considerable success pushing both the Avars and Slavs back across the great river. But years of near constant warfare had by now drained the imperial treasury. When Maurice attempted to slash military spending, it prompted the mutinous legions to march on the capital, killing the Emperor, and putting one of their own on the throne; the first successful coup in the Eastern Empire for nearly 250 years, but by no means the last. Late Roman-Persian War (602-628 AD) The legions elevated the obscure general Phocas (602–610), whose reign can only be described as an unmitigated disaster. He had problems almost from the start. Unable to effectively control either the state or the army, his reign was plagued by revolts and brutal purges of his opponents. Even worse, Khosrow II of the Sassanids refused to recognise him, seizing on the murder of Maurice who he owed for his own throne, and promising to avenge it. No doubt this was merely an excuse since the peace treaty had not been popular with his own subjects. The ensuing Roman-Persian War (602-628) was the bloody climax of the long struggle of East and West, that had begun a thousand years earlier with the Ancient Greeks and Achaemenid Persians; it has been describes as the "last world war of antiquity". With Phocas facing at least two separate internal revolts at the time, Khosrow's generals met little effective resistance as they began systematically subduing the heavily-fortified frontier cities of Byzantine Mesopotamia and Armenia. Then they would poured into Syria, capturing Antioch in 611, followed by Damascus in 613. In 614 a Persian army would sack Jerusalem, bearing away the the relic of the True Cross of Christ which was its most famous treasure. As Byzantine troops were hastily transferred to the east frontier, it left the Danube almost devoid of troops. The Balkans and Thrace were once again overrun by the Avars, Slavs, and yet another group, the Bulgars; a Turkic semi-nomadic peoples who had revolted against the Avars sometime after 600. This time they would never be turned back. This was the blackest moment for Rome in all her long struggle with Persia, but a saviour was at hand. He came from north Africa, virtually the only part of the Byzantine Empire not fighting for its life. The governor of the province stopped the grain-shipments to Constantinople, adding famine to the city's woes. Then considering himself to old to be Emperor, he sent his 36-year-old son Heraclius to the capital. When his fleet was within sighted from the city, the people rioted, seizing Phocas and laying him at Heraclius's feet; he personally beheaded him on the spot. As emperor, the greatest attribute of Heraclius (610-641) was his ability to inspire others even in the most desperate situations. The empire would have great need of this: Byzantine Spain was under renewed pressure from the Ostrogoths; the remaining Byzantine holdings in Italy were barely holding-out against the Lombards; Greece was now under pressure from the Avars, Slavs, and Bulgars; and the Persians would make Egypt part of their empire in 618, depriving the Byzantines of their chief source of grain. These disasters could not at once be stemmed but Heraclius was to prove one of the greatest of the soldier-emperors. For twelve long years, he focused on reorganising the remnants of his Empire, seeing to the defences on all the frontiers, and rebuilding the army. In order to get the populous to accept the sacrifices he would demand, he threatened to move the imperial capital to Carthage. His major innovations was the introduction of the theme system. While the imperial treasury was empty, Phocas had executed so many prominent landowners during his bloody reign that land was plentiful, especially in Anatolia. The new Byzantine army would be based once again on farmer-soldiers living on state-leased military estates, reminiscent of the early Roman citizen-soldiers. Heraclius' military reforms would be the backbone of the Byzantine army for the next 800 years. He also restored solvency to the empire by slashing non-military expenditure and melting down gold and silver donated (or demanded) from the Christian Church. By 622, Heraclius had quietly rebuilt Byzantine strength, and was finally ready to go on the offensive against the Persians. He used every advantage available to him: he personally led the army himself, the first emperor to do so in almost two-hundred years; and his campaign was steeped in the character of a holy war for Christianity, with an image of the Virgin Mary carried before the army as a military standard. Heraclius used the Byzantine control of the sea to catch the Persians completely by surprise, landing his 40,000 strong army to the north of Antioch near Issus, where Alexander the Great had defeated Darius almost a thousand years before. As he marched east through Armenia and into Persia itself, he studiously kept his army as one large force; with the Persians garrisoning so much conquered territories, no single army could stand in his way. The Byzantines cut a swath across Persia, with each victory boosting their morale. They marched into what is today northern Iraq, and sacked the great temple at Takht-i-Suleiman, the centre of Persian Zoroastrian fire-worship; Jerusalem had been avenged. The victorious army then pushed south to Ctesiphon, the ancient Persian capital. Heraclius did not try to assault the city, but drew a large Persian army into battle and rout it. Increasingly desperate, the Persians turned to diplomacy, persuading the Avar Khaganate to besiege Constantinople in the hope that Heraclius would withdraw to defend his capital. The Persian had long allied with the Avars, much as the Byztantines often allied with another emerging group further east, the Khazar Khaganate (630–969), who dominated the region north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. Heraclius was faced with a difficult decision; return and he would lose his best chance of winning the war. His solution was to divide his army in three: the first was sent back to defend Constantinople, the second under his brother marched to Anatolia to prevent the Persians from supporting the siege, and he himself remained in Persia with the third. So that Constantinople would not feel abandoned, he sent an avalanche of letters back to his capital discussing every detail of the defences. Moral in the city remained high, while the Avars and their siege engines battered away at the mighty Theodosian Walls. When the news arrived that Heraclius' brother had routed the Persian army in Anatolia, the Avars finally gave-up abandoning the siege. Another hard-fought victory over the Persians at the Battle of Nineveh (627), and the sack of Khosrow's great palace at Dastagird, ultimately proved decisive. Discredited by this series of disasters, the Persian army mutinied, killed Khosrow II, and his successor made peace. With both empires near exhaustion, the peace was amicable; the Byzantines regaining all their lost territories, as well as numerous relics that had been looted from Jerusalem in 614, including the True Cross. The long struggle with Persia was over; never again would they trouble the Byzantine Empire. When Heraclius returned to Constantinople, it was to find the entire populous waving olive branches and lit candle, as he march through the city baring the True Cross to a stirring ceremony at the Hagia Sophia. It seemed the dawn of a new age, but Heraclius' startling military successes barely lasted a decade. The long crippling war had been to the detriment of both Persia and Byzantium, leaving them weak and vulnerable. The relic of the True Cross would prove powerless in the face of a new predatory enemy. Before Heraclius died in 641 virtually all the territory recovered had been lost again to the armies of Islam. Life of Muhammad (570-632 AD) Islam has shown greater expansive and adaptive power than any other religion except Christianity, appealing to peoples as different and as distant from one another as Nigerians and Indonesians. Yet none of the other great shaping factors of world history were based on fewer initial resources, except perhaps Judaism. The comparisons inevitably suggests themselves for another reason, for Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the great monotheistic religions. Prior to the coming of Islam, Arabia had always been a backwater on the fringes of two great empires, but of little interest to either. At best it was the source of mercenaries; at worst occasional raiders. There was barely even a meaningful defence on the largely desert Arabian frontier. And Arabia had undergone little sophisticating fertilization from these higher civilizations. Those who lived there were subjected to very testing physical conditions; scorched in its hot season, most of Arabia was desert or rocky mountain. In much of it even survival was an achievement. But around its fringes there were little ports, the homes of Arabs who had long been seafarers, dating back to the second millennium BC. Their enterprise linked Indian Ocean trade to the Mediterranean; spices from India and gums of east Africa. The only favourable part of Arabia was the south-west (modern-day Yemen), which enjoys a short but predictable monsoon. The region was dotted with towns and cities, and from the 1st-century BC, there were a group of prosperous kingdoms, that survived until the 5th-century; both Islamic tradition and modern scholarship link their disappearance with the collapse of the irrigation system. Arabia declined swiftly into a society based on nomadic pastoralism; the Bedouin. The life of a nomad, without architecture or possessions other than what can be loaded on a camel, leaves few physical traces. But the richness of this pre-Islamic culture was preserved for us by early Muslim scholars, who collect and record well-loved stories handed down in a long oral tradition. These were feuding societies based along tribal lines. While somewhat similar to the Germanic peoples, one interesting difference is that in the Germanic tradition a chieftain was a war leader, while Bedouin leaders was chiefly an arbiter of disputes. At the end of the 6th-century new changes can be detected. At some oases, population was growing; while the Plague of Justinian that had decimated both the Byzantine and Persian populations, the Arabs had been insulated by the desert. Arabia could go from population growth to over-population with no outlet for it very fast; we'll see the same pattern again in 9th-century Scandinavia. Mecca and Medina were two such places. Medina was a large flourishing agricultural settlement, while Mecca was an important financial and pilgrimage center; people came to it from all over Arabia to venerate a black meteoric stone, the Kaaba, which had for centuries been important in Arab paganism. These were also important junction of caravan routes between the Yemen and Mediterranean ports. Along them came foreigners and new ideas. The Arabs were polytheists, believing in nature gods, demons and spirits, but as intercourse with the outside world increased, Jewish and Christian communities appeared in the area. Traditional social practices were further strained by the growing importance of merchants; unquestioned tribal loyalties were compromised by commercial values. These were some of the formative psychological pressures working on the tormented young Muhammad (d. 632). He was born into a respectable but not very affluent merchant family in Mecca, according to tradition in 570. Orphaned at an early age, he never lacked for the protection of his clan, and spent much of his youth among the nomadic caravans. His position as a merchant improved in his 20s when he married a wealthy widow 15-years his senior. Muhammad was a deeply religious man, and from time to time, would withdraw to the mountains in order to meditate and pray. It is said that while praying alone in a cave on Mount Hira in 610, he began having the visions that would change his life; and changed world history. The Archangel Gabriel appeared to him and relayed the word of God: “''Recite, in the name of your Lord! He who created! He created man from a clot of blood ...” These words became the opening line of the ''Sūrah chapter of one of the great formative books of mankind, the Qur'an; the definitive text was not established until about 650. Though not collected in his lifetime, it was taken down by his entourage as delivered by him in a series of revelations over 22-years. Muhammad saw himself as a passive instrument, a mouthpiece of God, familiar to his own people as Allah; the word Islam means submission or surrender. He was sent to confirm the message that there is one God, that He is just and will judge all men, who may assure their salvation by following His will in their religious observance and their personal behaviour. This God had been preached before, for he was the God of Abraham, of Moses, of Jesus, and of other prophets; their revelations had been heard by Jews and Christians, but they had since strayed from the path of grace. Muhammad was also sure that his position was special; through him God spoke his last message to mankind. From about 613, Muhammad began to preach in Mecca the truth that God had revealed to him, and soon gathered a small following. But uncompromising monotheism was not a popular creed with those in Mecca whose livelihood depended on catering to the thousands of idol worshippers who came to the city each year. Besides going against long standing beliefs, Muhammad went on to define a social and personal code that often conflicted with current ideas; for example the community was to be a brotherhood of the faithful, which superseded the importance of the clan group. Resistance to Muhammad and his followers grew, and in 622 they were forced to flee Mecca for Medina, a city 260-miles to the north. This journey, known as the Hijra, came to mark the beginning of the Islamic calendar. Conditions in Medina greatly favoured Muhammad's leadership. for the city was in the midst of a feud between several clans. In time, he became effectively the religious, political and even military ruler of the city; thus from the start, there was no tension of religious and secular authority in Islam, no conflict between Church and State such as was to shape Western Europe for a thousand years. From the spiritual emphasis of his preaching in Mecca, Muhammad turned to the practical, with detailed statements about food, drink, marriage, and war. These would become the Five Pillars of Islam, the foundations of a Muslim life: the declaration of faith, "there is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God"; five daily prayers, dawn, noon, afternoon, evening, and night; the giving of alms or charity to the poor; the observance of fasting during the month of Ramadan; and the obligation to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in one's life, if possible. Between 624 and '28, the Muslims of Medina were involved in open hostilities with Mecca, culminating in the Siege of Medina (March 627). Muhammad prevailed and was able to negotiate a peace, that allowed his followers to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Kaaba. On this first return to Mecca in 629, Muhammad's followers greatly impressed the locals both by their show of strength and by their self-discipline, departing peacefully after the agreed three days. The following year, his armies were able to take Mecca almost without resistance. An important element of Mecca's peaceful acceptance of Muhammad was his promise that pilgrimage to the Kaaba would remain a central feature of the new religion; he did enter the shrine and struck with his staff all the icons of the other deities which his followers were to wash out, sparing only the sacred black stone. Muhammad thus unified all the numerous tribes of the western half of Arabia under Islam. Mecca became the holy city of Islam, while Medina remained the political centre of the developing Islamic state. He made approaches to existing Arab Jewish communities, but they refused to accept his claims and were therefore driven out; a Muslim community alone remained. But this did not imply any enduring conflict with either Judaism or Christianity; doctrinal ties existed in their monotheism and their scriptures, even if Christians were believed to fall into polytheism with the idea of the Holy Trinity. Muhammad continued to preach until his death in 632, and was buried at al-Masjid an-Nabawi (the Mosque of the Prophet), one of the first mosques he built in Medina. Thus the great faith of Islam was born. Muslim Conquests (632-717 AD) After Muhammad’s passing, the community he had created was in grave danger of division and disintegration. He had no son, and there was no clear successor among his followers. Among the prominent candidates was his cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib, but in the end his father-in-law Abu Bakr (d. 634) was elected, and took the title Caliph meaning "successor". He ruled for less than two years, but suppressed resistance to his authority, and brought the unreconciled tribes of the east to the faith. He was the first of four rulers known as the Rashidun Caliphate (632–661), or "Rightly Guided" Caliphs, for being both unusually good generals and brilliant administrators. This was the first of the three major chronological divisions of Arab empire; the others being the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) and Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), though after 946 it was little more than a puppet regime. Between them the three dynasties gave the Arab peoples three centuries of ascendancy. The first and most obvious expression of this was an astonishing series of conquests in the first century of Islam which remade the world map; an era of conquest so extraordinary that only the example of the Mongols of the 13th-century can compare in the Middle Ages. Not doubt an initial impetus for conquests was to hold the Islamic community together, by turning resistance to the Caliphate into a war against external enemies. It is important to understand from the outset that although the conquests were driven at least partly by religious zeal, it was not by some fanatical desire to convert the conquered populations. Islam did of course spread throughout the peoples of the Islamic Empire, but this took place over decades and not under great pressure to convert. Beyond the Arabian Peninsula lay the great empires of the Byzantines and Sassanid Persians, both exhausted and hollowed-out just a few years after the Roman-Persian War (602-628). What began as raids for plunder, soon turned into a conquest as success bred success. The Muslim Arab armies poured into Byzantine Mesopotamia and Syria, capturing the great city of Damascus in 634, just two years after the passing of the Prophet. Emperor Heraclius (d. 641) responded to the situation by raising an army 80,000 strong and sending them to Palestine. As the Byzantine army approached, the Arabs tactically withdrew into the desert, but with Heraclius too old and frail to lead them, the Byzantine's couldn't agree on a strategy. At the Battle of Yarmouk (August 636), the numerically superior Byzantine army was goaded into battle, and massacred almost to a man. On the heels of this victories, the Arab armies took Antioch in 637, and the greatest prize of all the next year; Jerusalem which fell after a protracted siege. This was a moment of profound significance for the young religion, for Islam saw itself as the successor of Judaism and Christianity. On the Temple Mount, site of both Solomon's and Herod's temples, which had remained a ruin since the destruction of the temple by the Romans six centuries earlier, was built a mosque; this original mosque would later be replaced by a more magnificent monument, the Dome of the Rock, completed in 691. With Syria and Palestine firmly in Arab hand, the conquest of Egypt began about 640. It was swift and complete. The defences of Alexandria were sufficient to keep them at bay for fourteen months, but the city capitulated in September 642. The Byzantines agreed to leave peacefully; the Arabs duly allowed them one year in which to do so. One of the richest provinces of the Byzantine Empire had been lost to the Muslim world with barely a fight. According to Christian tradition, the Muslims are blamed for destroying the great Library of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world; this is almost certainly untrue, for it was probably lost centuries earlier, perhaps when Emperor Caracalla sacked the city. The Arabs continued rapidly westwards along the coast of north Africa, reaching Tripoli by 643, but this then remained little more than outposts for nearly three decades. By 649, the Byzantines weren’t even the masters of the Mediterranean anymore. Sailors from south-western Arabia, a major center of maritime trade, were brought to Alexandria to build an Islamic fleet. They started raiding and conquering the islands beginning with Cyprus in 649, and won their first major naval victory at the Battle of the Masts (655). Meanwhile between 633 and '54, the Muslim Arab armies conquered the Sassanid Persian Empire entirely. After the death of Khosrow II in 628, Persia had soon descended into four years of civil war that ended with an 8 year-old on the throne, Yazdegerd III (632-51). The year of his ascension, his rule stretched from the Euphrates to Afghanistan and beyond; thirty years later it no longer existed. That year the first Arab raiders arrived in Sassanid territory. The Persians never mounted a truly effective response until the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah (November 636), which lasted four days and only ending when the general of the exhausted Sassanid forces was killed; they lost the best of their army in this crushing defeat. Afterwards, Yazdegerd fled his capital of Ctesiphon, and the Arabs gained control of the heartland of Persia. A number of provincial governors attempted to combine their forces to throw back the invaders, but without effective leadership, they were again defeated at the Battle of Nihawānd (642). One of the great world empires for 400 year was now utterly helpless. As province after province came to terms with the Arabs, Yazdegerd continued to flee further east little more than a fugitive; he was supposed killed for his jewelry in 651 by a miller who didn't recognise him. The Sasanian Empire was thus taken over by the Arabs, but Persia would remain a cultural force within the the emerging Muslim world. The key to Arab success was that for a long time circumstances favoured them. Their first victims, Byzantium and Persia, had both been military exhausted at the time. After Persia went under, the Byzantine still had to contend with enemies in the west, fending them off with one hand while grappling with the Arabs with the other. And the Arabs still had other advantages. Their assurance in the Prophet’s teaching that death on the battlefield against the infidel would be followed by certain removal to paradise was a huge moral advantage. Their armies were recruited from hungry fighters, to whom the over-populated Arabian desert had left few alternatives. Their mastery of the desert allowed them to pick and choose their battles; the Vikings would have a similar advantage in their mastery of the sea. Their intense reliance on cavalry, just on the cusp of the arrival in Europe of the stirrup from China; cavalry would be king on the battlefield from now on until the arrival of the longbow in the 14th-century. They also fought their way into lands whose peoples were often already disaffected with their rulers; in Egypt, for example, Byzantine religious orthodoxy had created dissident and alienated Monophysite populations. The Muslim world offered tolerance for all religions. However, the fundamental explanation must lie in the movement of large numbers of men by a religious ideal. The Arabs thought they were doing God’s will and creating a new brotherhood in the process; they generated an excitement in themselves like that of later revolutionaries. There was a brief respite in the seemingly relentless Arab onslaught between 656 and 661, when the Muslim world entered a period of bitter civil war. The third Rashidun Caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (644-656), was something of a controversial figure. He was a member of the prominent Umayyad clan, who had initially resisted Muhammad in Mecca. He was criticized for his wealth and status, as well as for favouring his relatives in prominent positions. In 656, he was murdered by Muslim; the first Caliph assassinated by a member of the faith. In the early Islamic community, the vast majority had believed that the successors of Muhammad should be elected, but some believed that Muhammad's direct family had been divinely ordained. In an attempt to heal this rift, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib (656–661), was elected Caliph, a man overlooked in previous elections for unclear reasons. Whether Ali was actually involved in the death of Uthman is doubtful, but he was tainted by it. The result was a civil war known as the First Fitna (656–661) with resistance led by a member of the Umayyad clan, Mu'awiya (d. 680), then the governor of Syria. It ended with the assassination of Ali, though not at his hands. It was also the foundation of the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750). His power base had been Syria, and Mu-Awiyah moved the capital from Medina to the more centrally located Damascus. Against considerable opposition he establishes a new principle, later naming his son crown prince; the role of Caliph would henceforth be hereditary rather than elected. Yet the First Fitna solved nothing and was the root of the major schism in the history of Islam, between the Sunni and Shi'a branches; Shi'at Ali means the "party or faction of Ali". The minority Shi'a formed a lasting dissident faction within Islam. For a long time, they remained a embattled underground movement, but in time would become a political force in their own right, with the establishment of Fatimid Egypt. Under the Umayyads, the Muslim Arab conquests rolled on. In north-west Africa, they established a new outpost at Kairouan in 670 about 60-miles south of Byzantine Carthage; later home to one of Africa’s greatest mosques. The Byzantines briefly halted the advance in 683, forming an alliance with the nomadic Moors and seizing Kairouan. But the Arabs soon regrouped, retaking Kairouan in 689 and capturing Carthage in 698; the city was destroyed yet again and remained a ruin for the next two centuries. By the 709 north-west Africa was firmly in Arab hands and the Moors were readily adopting this potent new religion, perhaps attracted by their cultural similarities to the Bedouin. The final thrust of expansion in the west began with the short journey across the water into Visigothic Spain in 711. The conquest is notable for its brevity and the unreliability of the sources. In 710, the Visigothic Kingdom descended into civil war after the death of King Wittiza (702-710), a situation the Arabs were no doubt well aware of through Arian Christian and Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. In 711 an Arab army with Moorish allies crossed the Straits of Gibraltar; its commander, Tariq ibn Ziyad, is commemorated in that name, which means Jebel Tariq or "mount of Tariq". The Visigothic usurper Roderic was soon defeated and killed trying to oppose the invasion, and within perhaps two years governors appointed by the Caliph in Damascus were ruling almost the entire Iberian Peninsula, except for a small area in the north, where Christian Visigothic survivors had taken refuge behind the mountains of the Cordillera Cantábrica, with the ever independent Basques. This tiny enclave of Medieval Christian Spain would be the roots of the eventual Reconquista. ''By 717, Arab raiders were crossing the Pyrenees into the Frankish Realm. Ending the Muslim Tide in Eastern Europe (717-768) The Muslim Arabs tide seemed invincible, born as it was on the fire of religious zeal, destined to spread Islam by the sword throughout Europe and the world. In their overwhelming assault on the Byzantine Empire, only one campaign had been consistently unsuccessful; the capture of Constantinople itself. The great city was first besieged in 674-678, though it would more accurately be described as a 5-year naval-blockade rather than a proper siege. The Arab fleet was finally driven-off through the use of a secret weapons had recently invented, ''Greek Fire. The discovery is attributed to a Syrian engineer called Kallinikos, who fled during the Arab conquest of the province. This flammable liquid could be sprayed or lobbed at enemy ships with devastating results, burning even while floating on water and almost impossible to extinguish. It was considered such a state secret that even today we don't know it's exact composition, although it was almost certainly petroleum-based. Four decades later the Arabs were back beneath the walls of Constantinople, this time with 80,000 men and a fleet of 1,800 ships; the Siege of Constantinople (717–718). Since the reign of Heraclius (d. 641), the Byzantines had squandered their strength in chaotic squabbles over the throne. Of the next ten Emperors, one died of dysentery and the rest were overthrown; one of them, Justinian II (705-11), was overthrown twice. In this new desperate hour of need, Leo III (717-741) was elevated to the purple in a peaceful coup; his predecessor was allowed to retire to a monastery. Leo was a man of humble birth who had risen quickly through the imperial ranks to governor of the militarised province of Anatolia. He had campaigned extensively against Arab armies, spoken fluent Arabic, and possessed a keen understanding of Arab mind. Leo would provide the lone bright-spot in the military history of this period, going on to outsmart the besiegers at every turn. The best chance to take Constantinople was via the significantly lower sea walls, rather than the mighty Theodosian Walls. The Arab fleet thus attempted to sailed-up the Hellespont to encircle the city prior to an assault, but Leo deployed his navy and their Greek Fire sank about 20 of the Arab transport-ships. The Arab fleet was able to blockade the city but there was no assault. Meanwhile to hamper the besieging army outside the Theodosian Walls, Leo had negotiated an alliance with the Bulgars, who now occupied Thrace, to make common cause against the Arabs. They constantly harassed the Muslim supply-lines and foraging parties, and the Arabs suffered terrible famine and disease throughout an unusually hard winter. In the spring, the Caliph sent 20,000 soldiers and a few hundred ships to reinforce the siege, but both ended in disaster. With the Arab navy overstretched, the second fleet was largely crewed by Christians, many of whom defected to the Byzantines, bringing valuable information about the Arab naval blockade. The Byzantine navy was able to destroy the helpless northern portion of the Arab fleet. At the same time, the Muslim army of reinforcements was drawn into an ambush and destroyed in the hilly terrain of Anatolia. With these disasters, the Arabs were finally forced to abandon the siege after thirteen months. The retreat was plagued by calamities too: the Buglars attacked while the Arabs were making for the ships killing perhaps 20,000 men; and the vast majority of the fleet was sunk by winter storms or harassment by the Byzantine navy. It is said that less than 30,000 men made it back to Arab territory. Historians often include this siege among the most important battles in European history. The Arabs had suffered their first massive defeat. Regular attacks on Byzantine territories would continue, but the goal of outright conquest of Constantinople was effectively abandoned. The Byzantine capital's survival preserved the Empire as a bulwark against Islamic expansion into Eastern and Central Europe for centuries, as well as preventing the Mediterranean becoming an "Arabian lake". Having thus saved Constantinople, Emperor Leo III nevertheless turned around and unleashed a religious firestorm that would rip the Byzantine Empire apart for the next one hundred years; the Iconoclasm Controversy (726-842). Ending the Muslim Tide in Western Europe (717-768) The Frankish Realm was Western Europe's dominant power, but for centuries political structures were fragile things. The Frankish custom of divided inheritance did not help, leading to frequent internecine warfare. After Clovis, though there was dynastic continuity, it depended on strong kings; ruling was a very personal activity. Dagobert I (634–639) is commonly regarded as the last powerful Merovingian king. Thereafter royal authority rapidly declined under a series of feeble kings, with the landed military-aristocracy increasingly becoming political players on their own account. Political maneuvering centred on the four royal courts - Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy, and Aquitaine - and was dominated by a leader of the court known as the Mayor of the Palace. ''After 639, they gradually accumulated more and more power to themselves, adding to their duties the roles of chief adviser to the king, tutor to royal princes, and even commander of the royal army. The Mayors meanwhile increasingly substituted their own interest for their king's; in a pattern similar to what would happen in 12th-century Japan, resulting in the rule of the Shoguns. By the mid-7th-century, the conflicts of the past between Frankish kingdoms thus transitioned into a power struggle and outright warfare between the various ''Mayors. In the end Mayor Pepin II of Austrasia (d. 714) won out at the Battle of Tertry (687), and henceforth came to overshadow the Merovingian royal line; he can be seen with hindsight as the founder of a new royal dynasty. He was marched in his power only by Duke Odo of Aquitaine (d. 735), a formidable political operator in both the Frankish and Visigothic realms. After Pepin's long rule, his illegitimate son Charles Martel (718-741) assumed power, having emerged victorious from an internecine struggle with Pepin's only legitimate male descendants, a grandson; from his first name, Carolus in Latin, his descendants would become known to history as the Carolingians (714-987). As the de facto master of the Frankish Realm, his reputation for ruthlessness further undermined the position of the king; his nickname Martel or "the Hammer" was earned for his military prowess. In recent decades, there had emerged a new and powerful threat to the Franks, Muslim Spain. The Arabs press on northward from 717, and two years later had a solid foothold beyond the Pyrenees at Narbonne. The first major incursion in 721 briefly besieged Toulouse, the capital of Acquitaine, until Duke Odo arrived and routed them. But this Arab defeat did not stop their raiding, with one reaching as far as Burgundy in 725. The next major Arab incursion came in 732, this time defeating Odo, and sacking and plundering Bordeaux. Following two subsequent defeats, Odo had no choice to appeal to Charles Martel to help save his duchy, who agreed but in return for submitting to Frankish authority. The two sides met at the Battle of Tours (732), about which there is little we can certain, other than that the Arab commander was killed prompting their army to withdraw back to Muslim Spain. Charles certainly claimed a victory, and Tour was heavily mythologised in medieval Europe as the landmark battle that saved Christian France; later historians like Edward Gibbon make fanciful claims that if the outcome had been different, "the interpretation of the Qur'an would now be taught in the schools of Oxford". Most modern historians take a more nuanced view: this was a major Arab raid rather than an invasion; raids continued for the next few years as far as the upper Rhône; it was probably a revolt by Moorish mercenaries in Spain in 741 that prompted the Muslims to finally realise that their vast empire had reached its natural limits; and it was certainly a secondary loss to the great defeat at the Siege of Constantinople of 717. While much attention has been paid to his military successes, Charles Martel also laid the groundwork for a strong centralised rule. It is clear from the evidence, that his government was complex and document based in a very Roman way, and he was active throughout his realm, intervening a long way from the Austrasian court; now the only court. Thus despite the turmoil of the previous decades, the Frankish Realm was evidently pretty solid at its base. This solidity was partly due to the constraints on aristocratic ambitions. Politics however self-interests revolved above all around the court; those who did not attended the twice yearly court risked being seen as hostile, or even worse, as nobodies. And nobles were for a long time more concerned with the amount of land than where it was, so could be shifted around quite regularly; making local power-bases weak and going-it-alone impossible. The dice were thus weighted in favour of central power. At the same time, Charles vigorously supported the missionary activities of Bishop Boniface of Mainz in Germany, hoping that conversion to Christianity would tame the heathens; this confirmed the alliance of Martel’s house with the Church. Charles himself maintained the fiction of Merovingian power, and as did his son Pepin III (743-769) at first. But by 751, Pepin gave up the pretense, forcing the last Merovingian king into a monastery, and having himself crowned King of the Franks. However little power the Merovingian kings had, the tradition of their rule went back 250 years. Thus Pepin sought legitimacy for his usurpation of the throne through the Church; he was anointed king with sacred oil by Bishop Boniface and later by Pope Stephen II (752-57) himself, who pronounced that, "he who holds the power, should wear the crown". Such direct involvement in the dynastic politics of Europe was a significant step for the Christian Church, which benefited both sides; without the support of the Church the Carolingians were just another aristocratic family, while the papacy needed a powerful friend to maintain its independence against the Lombards, who had seized Byzantine Ravenna by 751. The archbishop of Rome drew the dividend on its investment almost at once, with Pepin invading Italy and driving the Lombards from Ravenna in 756. He then gave to the papacy all the territories encompassed by Rome and Ravenna; this formed the legal basis of the Papal State, that still exists today albeit in a much reduced form. It was the beginning of eleven hundred years of the secular authority enjoyed by the pope over his own realm as a ruler like any other ruler. An alliance between the Franks and the Church had been created. From it stemmed the reform of the Frankish Church, further colonisation and missionary conversion in Germany, and the throwing back of the Arabs across the Pyrenees. Although Pepin was unquestionably one of the most successful rulers of his time, his reign has been largely overshadowed by that of his son, the towering figure of early medieval Europe, Carlemagne. Ending the Muslim Tide in the East (717-768) In the east after the Arab conquest of Sassanid Persia in 651, Arabs generals would continue sporadically eastward. They conquered Kabul in Afghanistan in 664. They reached the Indus Valley on the Indian subcontinent in 708, and controlled all of the lower river three years later. North of the Himalayas, the frontier of the Islam world settled down along the Oxus River after a great Arab defeat at the hands of the Turkic Khazar Khaganate (650-969) in what is now Azerbaijan, and a victory at the Battle of Talas (751) over a Tang Chinese army near Tashkent. For the Arabs, an interesting fringe benefit of victory at Talas was that Chinese prisoners-of-war revealed the secrets of Chinese paper-making, or so the story goes; certainly paper was being manufactured in Baghdad by 794. The technology would revolutionise the Islamic world, and later Europe. On all fronts, in western Europe, Anatolia, and in Central Asia, the tide of Arab conquest at last came to an end in the middle of the eighth century. Whatever brought it to an end, and sometimes their defeats showed they had overstretched themselves, the Islamic conquest remains an astonishing achievement. And conquest was only the beginning of the story of the impact of Islam on the world, for great traditions of Muslim civilization were to be built on its conquests.Category:Historical Periods